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important fragment and quotes

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MARTIN H ei deg ger ’s _V IEW ON AESTHETICS

So, for ex ample, everyone knows that Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” is a great work of art; we think we “know ” this, even if the painting has never spoken to us at all, or if we have only heard that “they say” It ’s Beautyful .

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— Bec ause of T h at ev ery t hing pr imordi a l gets glossed ov er as somet hing long fa mili a r .

Ev ery t hing ga ined by a st ruggle becomes just somet hing to be m a nipul at ed.

— Ev ery m yst ery loses it's pow er .

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“the establishing of truth in the work is the bringing forward of a being such as never was before and will never come to be again�. In artistic creation, the artist responds to what offers itself, creatively discerning and helping to realize the outlines of a new world in the manifold possibilities offered up by the earth.

Heidegger had alr

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eady observed that

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r e a d, and e litre and he way es a n d ges.�

H e i d eg g e r ’ s A est h e t ic s ∆ First published Thu Feb 4, 2010; substantive revision Tue May 10, 2011

1 . I n t r o d uc t io n: B e yo n d t h e Ox y m o r o n Treating Heidegger’s thinking about art as “aesthetics” would strike him as incongruous and inappropriate because he consistently insisted that the “aesthetic” approach has led Western humanity to understand and experience the work of art in a way that occludes its true historical significance.

Nor can Heidegger’s thinking be sympathetically classified as “anti-aesthetic,” because he suggests that any such antiaesthetics would remain blindly entangled in aesthetics (in the same way that, for example, atheism remains implicated in the logic of theism—both claiming to know the unknowable); in his view, any merely oppositional movement remains trapped in the logic of what it opposes (QCT 61/GA5 217).

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the only way to get beyond aesthetics is first to understand how it shapes us and then seek to pass through and beyond that influence, thereby getting over it as one might “recover” from a serious illness.

Because the aesthetic approach continues to eclipse our access to the role artworks can quietly play in forming and informing our historical worlds, Heidegger thinks: that only such a post-aesthetic thinking about art can allow us to recognize and restore art ’s true significance, helping us recognize the inconspicuous way in which art works to shape our basic sense of what is and what matters.

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1 . 1 U n d e r sta n di ng o f t h e T r u e Wo r k o f A r t To understand Heidegger’s critique of aesthetics, it will help first to sketch his positive view of art’s true historical role.

Heidegger’s own understanding of the work of art is resolutely populist but with revolutionary aspirations. He believes that, at its greatest, art “grounds history” by “allowing truth to spring forth” (PLT 77/GA5 65). Building on Heraclitus’s view of the pervasive tension of normative conceptual oppositions (good/bad, worthy/worthless, noble/base, and the like) that undergird and implicitly structure our sense of ourselves and our worlds, Heidegger imagines the way an ancient Greek temple at Paestum once worked to help unif y its historical world by tacitly reinforcing a particular sense of what is and what matters: It is the temple-work that first joins together and simultaneously gathers around itself the unit y of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline obtain the form of destiny for human being. …The temple first gives to things their look and to humanity their outlook on themselves.

(PLT 42–3/GA5 27–9)

(1) “ first give to things their look,” that is, they help establish an historical community’s implicit sense of what things are, and they give; (2) “to humanity their outlook on themselves,” that is, they also help shape an historical communit y’s implicit sense of what truly matters in life, which lives are most worth living, which actions are “noble”, what in the communit y’s traditions most deserves to be preserved, and so on;

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Great art works work in the background of our historical worlds, in other words, by partially embodying and so selectively reinforcing an historical communit y’s implicit sense of what is and what matters. In this way, great artworks both:

Heidegger thinks that humanity’s fundamental experience of reality changes over time, and he suggests that the

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work of art helps expl ain the basic mechanism of this historic al tr ansform ation of intelligibilit y. Bec ause great art works inconspicuously to establish, m aintain, and tr ansfor m hum anit y ’s historic ally-variable sense of w hat is and what m at ters, Heidegger

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emph asizes t h at “a rt is t he becoming a nd h a ppening of t ru t h ” — In sum, great art works by selectively focusing an historical community’s tacit sense of what is and what matters and ref lecting it back to that communit y, which thereby comes implicitly to understand itself in the light of this artwork.

That artworks can variously “manifest,” “articulate,” or even “reconfigure” the historical ontologies undergirding their cultural worlds.

(2) paradigmatic artworks like Van Gogh’s painting and Hölderlin’s poetry, which disclose how art itself works; (3) macro-paradigmatic “great” works of art like the Greek temple and tragic drama, which succeed in fundamentally transforming an historical community’s “understanding of being,” its most basic and ultimate understanding of what is and what matters; It is with this ontologically revolutionary potential of great art in mind that Heidegger writes: Whenever art happens—that is, when there is a beginning—a push enters history, and history either starts up or starts again. (PLT 77/GA5 65) That is, great art is capable of overcoming the inertia of existing traditions and moving the interconnected ontological and ethical wheels of history, either giving us a new sense of what is and what matters or else fundamentally transforming the established ontology and ethics through which

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(1) things thinging,” which help us become aware of what matters most deeply to us;

we make sense of the world and ourselves. Given Heidegger’s view of the literally revolutionary role art can thus play in inconspicuously shaping and transforming our basic sense of what is and what matters, his occasionally ill-tempered critiques of the reduction of art to aesthetics become much easier to understand. For, in his view, the stakes of our understanding of and approach to art could not be higher.

2 . Ph i lo so ph ic a l C r i t iq u e o f A est h e t ic s

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2 . 1 H o w H e i d eg g e r U n d e r sta n ds A est h e t ic s How to understand our relation to the beautiful? To recognize that the central focus of modern aesthetics is beaut y is not to deny its traditional interest in the sublime or its late-modern preoccupations with the abject, the obscene, kitsch, and so on. Heidegger’s point, rather, is that aesthetics is that kind of meditation on art in which humanit y’s state of feeling in relation to the beautiful represented in art is the point of departure and the goal that sets the standard for all its definitions and explanations. (N1 78/GA43 91) In its paradigmatic form (the form “that sets the standard ” for all its other “ definitions and explanations”), modern “aesthetics is the consideration of humanit y’s state of feeling in relation to the beautiful ” (N1 78/GA43 90).

The artwork is posited as the “object ” for a “subject,” and this subject-object relation, specifically as a relation of feeling, is definitive for aesthetic consider ation. (N1 78/GA43 91) In other words, modern aesthetics frames its understanding of art by presupposing the subject/object dichotomy: Aesthetics presupposes a fundamental divide between the art “object” and the experiencing “subject,” a divide which is subsequently crossed by the commerce of sensation or feeling. Of course, the subject/object dichotomy forms the very basis of the modern worldview, so we would be surprised if modern aesthetics did not presuppose it. So, what specifically does Heidegger object to about the way the aesthetic approach to art presupposes a viewing subject, standing before some art object, enjoying (or not enjoying) his or her sensory experience of this artwork?

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2 . 2 H e i d eg g e r ’ s C r i t iq u e o f t h e A est h e t ic A ppr oac h

the a rt wor k becomes a n ob jec t of li v ed e x per ience , a nd in t his way a rt comes to coun t as a n e x pr ession of hum a n life .

(QCT 116/GA5 75)

Heidegger is making two connected points here (which are numbered accordingly). The first is that when art is understood and approached “aesthetically,” artworks become objects for human subjects to experience in an especially intense, vital, or meaningful way. We can see this if we unpack his typically dense language: As Heidegger frequently points out, in the modern, post-Cartesian world, an “object,” Gegenstand, is something that “stands opposite” a human subject, something external to subjectivit y. In order to experience an object, the modern subject supposedly must first get outside the immanent sphere of its own subjectivit y so as to encounter this “external ” object, and then return back to its sub-

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— A “ li v ed e x per ience ” is a n e x per ience t h at m a k es us feel “mor e a li v e ”

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I n H ei deg g a ll gr e at a r t r ecogn i z e a n d r com ple x t e x t li n e s, a n d br toge t h er co ope n-e n ded “ ba “ou t li n e sk e tc a r t is t t h e n ge s ta lt s i n or at l e a s t on e of t i bl e ” sh a pe s s t the earth in of t h e w

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(PLT 63/GA5 51)

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ger 's v i e w, is t s l e a r n to r e spon d to t h e t u r e of edge s, r e a k s w h ich ons t i t u t e a n a sic de sign ” or ch ”, w h ich t h e cr e at i v ely r der to br i ng t h e “ i n e x h aus tt ill h i dde n i n to t h e ligh t wor l d.

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A rt IS HEROIC IN THE WAY, WHICH m a k es possible for hum a n bei ngs, to con t i n ue to u n desta n d t he WORLD AN d pot en t i a lly M a k e it mor e me a n i ngful TO us.

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jective sphere bearing the fruits of this encounter. Given the modern subject/object dichotomy, such an adventure beyond subjectivity and back again is required for the experience of any object. But in the case of the art object, Heidegger is pointing out, the adventure beyond subjectivit y and back again is a particularly intense, meaningful.

In this aesthetic approach, to put it simply, art objects express and intensif y human subjects’ experiences of life. What Heidegger thus characterizes as the aesthetic approach to art will probably seem so obvious to most people that it can be hard to see what he could possibly find objectionable about it. Art objects express and intensif y human subjects’ experiences of life; to many people, it might not even be clear what it could mean to understand art in any other way. How should we understand and approach art, if not in terms of the meaningful experiences that a subject might have of

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The second point Heidegger is trying to make is that when artworks become objects for subjects to have particularly meaningful experiences of, these artworks themselves also get understood thereby as meaningful expressions of an artistic subject’s own life experiences. Heidegger does not ever develop any argument for this point; the thought simply seems to be that once aesthetics understands artworks as objects of which we can have meaningful experiences, it is only logical to conceive of these art objects themselves in an isomorphic way, as meaningful expressions of the lives of the artists who created them. Still, this alleged isomorphism of aesthetic “expression and impression” is not immediately obvious. Think, for example, about the seriously playful “ found art” tradition in Surrealism, dada, Fluxus, and their heirs, a tradition in which ordinary objects get seditiously appropriated as “art.” (The continuing inf luence of Marcel Duchamp’s “readymade” remains visible in everything from Andy Warhol ’s meticulously reconstructed “Brillo Boxes” (1964) to Ruben Ochoa’s large-scale installations of industrial detritus such as broken concrete, rebar, and chain-link fencing, such as “Ideal Disjuncture” (2008). Vattimo thus suggests that Duchamp’s “Fountain” illustrates the way an artwork can disclose a new world, a world in which high art comes to celebrate not only the trivial and ordinary but also the vulgar and even the obscene.)[16] This tradition initially seems like a series of deliberate counter-examples to the aesthetic assumption that artworks are meaningful expressions of an artist’s own subjectivity.

some art object, an art object which is itself a meaningful expression of the life of the artist (or artists) who created it?

What exactly does Heidegger think is wrong with this “picture” of art?

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Despite what one might expect from a phenomenologist like Heidegger, his objection is not that the aesthetic view mischaracterizes the way we late moderns ordinarily experience “art.” On the contrary, Heidegger clearly thinks that what he characterizes as “the increasingly aesthetic fundamental position taken toward art as a whole” (N1 88/GA43 103) does accurately describe the experiences of art that take place—when they do take place—in museums, art galleries, and installations; in performance spaces, theaters, and movie houses; in cathedrals, coliseums, and other ruins; in cityscapes as well as landscapes; in concert halls, music clubs, and comic books; even when we listen to our speakers, headphones, ear-buds; and, sometimes (who could credibly deny it?), when we sit in front of our television screens, computer monitors, iPhones, and so on. The experiences we have of what rises to the level of “art” in all such settings are indeed “aesthetic” experiences, that is, particularly intense or meaningful experiences that make us feel more alive; and, if we think about it, we do tend to approach these art objects as expressions of the life of the artists who created them. The aesthetic view correctly characterizes our t ypical experience of “art” in the contemporary world—and for Heidegger that is part of the problem. ...

∆ SOURCE: STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY http://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/win2011/entries/ heidegger-aesthetics/

N1 Nietzsche: The Will to Power as Art. David Farrell Krell, ed. and trans.

NY: Harper & Row, 1979.

QCT The Question Concerning Technology. W. Lovitt, trans.

NY: Harper & Row, 1977.

PLT Poetry, Language, Thought. A. Hofstadter, trans. NY: Harper & Row, 1971.

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First Part

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W est er n hum a ni t y sense of being c a n only be ch a nged histor ic a lly t hrough t he cr e at i v e discov ery of possibili t ies hidden w i t hin t he t r a di t ion t h at h as come dow n to us .

Second Part

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Only by discov er ing the t r a di t ions hidden her i tage c a n w e hope to r esh a pe our communa l sense of w h at is a nd w h at m at t ers , t her eby r edr aw ing the basic con tour s of t his t r a di t ion a nd so cr e at ing new possibili t ies for hum a n understa nding a nd ac t ion .

In t his way, for Heidegger , a rt r em a ins c a pa ble of r edr aw ing t he lines

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Third Part

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t h at esta blish our basic sense of w h at is a nd w h at m at t ers .

For a rt to accomplish t his r evolut iona ry task , how ev er , t he a rt ist must be a ble to see something begin ning to ta k e sh a pe w her e ot hers see not hing at a ll .

A ll gr e at cr e ator s must be a ble to discer n t he inchoat e con tours of somet hing pr ev iously unseen

Fourth Part

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a nd, as if t hus pl ay ing midw ife to being, help dr aw i t in to t he ligh t of t he wor ld.

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If a n y t hi ng is quest iona ble her e, it is r at her t h at w e e x per ienced too lit t le i n t he i n t im ac y of t he wor k a n d t h at, how w e e x pr essed t he e x per ience is too lit er a lly.

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∞ w e sh NOt g u t ry i n k now t hi n

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∞ hould gi v e p ng to w n ew ngs.

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This is important, because to make something from what is really there—something which is neither obviously determined by what of fers itself to us nor simply ignores what of fers itself to us in order to impose its own subjective idea—this is what all true artistic creation does, according to Heidegger's view (presented in section 3.7).[98] As we saw, every “authentic” hermeneutics must do this; to interpret any great work of art, “you yourself ” have to struggle to bring forth its hidden riches, just as the farmer must struggle with the earth to bring forth the bount y nurtured within it. To engage in such phenomenological hermeneutics, we might thus say, is to encounter oneself as a farmer of meaning. For, such an encounter allows us to understand for ourselves what it is like when the earth comes to inform our worlds with a genuine, partly independent meaning which we ourselves brought forth creatively and yet did not simply make-up or project onto the work. When we catch ourselves in the act of making-sense of an artwork in this way, then we experience for ourselves that fundamental making-sense from which, for Heidegger, all genuine meaning ultimately derives.

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“ to a bei n t h e wa [w i e e t u r ns be “ t h e di f f i ta s

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